The first travel writer was gay

By Daniel Scheffler

Let me tell you something that nobody in the travel writing business wants to admit, because it would require us all to rethink the tidy little origin story we’ve given ourselves.

The first travel writer was not a journalist. He was not a blogger with a round-the-world ticket and a good camera. He was not a Victorian gentleman with a pith helmet and a mild case of colonial entitlement. He was a Roman emperor who spent more than half his reign on the road, who built a wall across Britain not because he wanted more territory but because he’d looked at the map and decided enough, who rebuilt the Pantheon and wrote poetry and had the beard of a philosopher before beards were fashionable (I know it’s mustache now, but whatever) — and who loved a young man from Bithynia so completely, so catastrophically, so without apology, that when that young man drowned in the Nile, he tore a hole in the known world trying to fill it.

His name was Publius Aelius Hadrianus. We call him Hadrian.

And he was, in every way that matters, the first travel writer.

 

They have announced the book is going to be tv series

The Road as a Way of Life

Hadrian spent twelve of his twenty-one years as emperor traveling. Not visiting. Not touring. Traveling. He was out there — in Britain, in Greece, in Egypt, in Syria, in North Africa — governing through presence, understanding the empire by walking through it, by standing in it, by smelling it and eating in it and making decisions inside it rather than from a marble room in Rome.

This is not what emperors did. Emperors sent legates. Emperors received reports. Emperors stayed in Rome and let the empire come to them in dispatches and tribute.

Hadrian went to the empire. He went to see.

This is the essential instinct of every travel writer who has ever lived. Not tourism. Not displacement. The hunger to understand a place by being in it, bodily, fully, without the mediation of someone else’s account. Herodotus had it. Pausanias had it. Bruce Chatwin had it so badly it killed him. Hadrian had it first, and he had it at a scale that has never been matched before or since.

He didn’t just pass through. He built. Hadrian’s Wall in Britain. Hadrianotherae in Asia Minor. A library in Athens. And at Tivoli, outside Rome, his boytoyvilla — a structure so vast and so beautiful that it was less a home than a travel journal rendered in marble and water and light. He recreated the places he had loved: the Canopus of Egypt, the Stoa Poikile of Athens, the Vale of Tempe. He came home and built his memories. If that isn’t the act of a writer, I don’t know what is.

The Part They Leave Out

Now. Let’s talk about the part that makes certain historians clear their throats and change the subject.

Hadrian was a homo. Or — to use the language of his own world, which had no word for it but also had no particular problem with it — he loved men. He had a politically arranged wife, Vibia Sabina, and by all accounts they detested each other with a mutual (and according to my book) an efficient passion. He also loved Antinous.

Antinous was from Bithynia, in what is now Turkey. He was, by every account that survives, extraordinarily beautiful. He met Hadrian as a young boy, was brought into the imperial circle, educated, traveled with the emperor across the known world. By 125 CE he was living at Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli (oh daddy!), accompanying him on every journey. They were together in Athens, where both were initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries — the ancient world’s most sacred and secret rites. They hunted together in Libya, where Hadrian killed a lion that charged Antinous. They traveled together to Egypt in 130 CE.

And then, on the Nile, Antinous drowned.

He was not yet twenty years old.

The circumstances of his death have never been resolved. Accident. Murder. Suicide. Dramatic something. Or — and this is the theory that haunts — deliberate self-sacrifice, because there was a belief in Egypt that a willing death in the Nile could “transfer vitality to a beloved.” Hadrian had been ill. There are historians who believe Antinous stepped into that river for him.

We will never know. What we know is what came after.

The Architecture of Grief

 

What I am reading

Hadrian’s response to the death of Antinous was one of the most extraordinary acts of mourning in recorded history. He wept openly — which shocked Rome, because emperors were not supposed to do anything like that. He founded a city, Antinoöpolis, on the site of the drowning. He instituted a religious cult in Antinous’s honor, spreading it across the empire. He commissioned statues. I am talking more than two thousand statues of Antinous were produced across the Roman world. More images survive of Antinous than of almost any figure in classical antiquity; except Augustus and Hadrian himself.

Two thousand statues. For a boy from Bithynia. Because an emperor loved him and could not bear the world without his face in it. I mean, I get it, I GET IT.

This is not a footnote. This is not a historical curiosity to be mentioned in a paragraph and then moved past. This is a man using the full machinery of imperial power to say: this person mattered, this love was real, I will not pretend otherwise. In a world that had no language for what they were to each other, Hadrian invented one. He built it in marble. He spread it from Britain to Egypt.

And then he kept traveling. Because what else do you do? The road is the only answer to grief that has ever truly worked, and every travel writer since has known it in their bones.

The Tradition He Started

Here is my provocation, and I mean it seriously: the travel writing tradition has always belonged, disproportionately, to people who didn’t quite fit where they were born.

Hadrian, who was actually Spanish-born but Greek at heart, who was never entirely Roman. Jan Morris, who traveled the world and wrote about identity and belonging and the self in unfamiliar landscapes with a precision that takes my pithy breath away — and who knew more than most about what it means to arrive somewhere new and have to construct yourself from scratch. Bruce Chatwin, restless and queer and constitutionally unable to stay still, who wrote about nomads and wanderers because he was one. Patrick Leigh Fermor, who walked across Europe as an eighteen-year-old and never really stopped.

The road has always been a refuge for people for whom home was complicated. This is not a weakness in the tradition. It is its greatest strength. The best travel writing has always been written by people who understand, at some cellular level, what it costs to be somewhere you don’t belong — and what it means, occasionally and miraculously, to arrive somewhere that feels, against all odds, like some form of recognition.

Hadrian understood all of this. He built an empire out of it. He grieved so loudly that the grief became I guess what some might call a religion.

He also, incidentally, built a wall, rebuilt the Pantheon, reformed the legal system, wrote poetry, and found time to grow the first imperial beard in Roman history — which is, frankly, an extraordinary for someone who spent half his career on the road.

Hadrian also went everywhere. And everywhere he went, he paid attention. He noticed. He built what he saw into something permanent. He carried the places he loved back with him and recreated them in stone and water and light. He’s a lunatic, I am aware.

That is travel writing. That is what we do. We go. We look. We feel it in the body. We come back changed and we spend the rest of our lives trying to describe this exact change. Ouch.

The first person to do it was an emperor who loved a boy from Bithynia and spent twenty-one years trying to understand the world by walking through it. I guess it is well past time we gave him the byline he deserves.

Inspired by my friend Sue, “History is not what happened. It is what we choose to remember, and how we choose to tell it. So, tell it better.”